Day 84

I opened our front door this morning, picked up our copy of The Globe and Mail delivered in the middle of the night, and without even removing the elastic band wrapped around it, dropped it straight into the recycling bin in our garage.

Rodney’s away in the interior of BC this week, and as he’s the only one who still reads the paper, I see no point in having it lying around and exposing me to front-page headlines I have absolutely no interest in seeing.

That may not sound radical, but it startled me. For most of my adult life, leaving a newspaper unread would have felt almost irresponsible. As a former journalist, reading the news wasn’t just a habit. It was part of who I was.

And here I am now.

My News Detox.

Day 84.

I still have absolutely no desire, not even the slightest urge, to know what made today’s front page or any page of any newspaper.

Okay, if I’m being completely honest, I haven’t forsaken my Sunday morning ritual with The New York Times. I carefully pull out the Book Review, the Magazine, Arts and Leisure, and Styles, without glancing at Opinion. The Business section can be interesting too, especially the hand-wringing stories about AI as a harbinger of the end of the world. But absolutely no politics or international news, please.

Occasionally, I zone out and can’t stop myself from scrolling through Instagram dog videos. I keep stumbling on one in particular that I can watch over and over again. A dog contemplates the rainy day outside a window while a voiceover, Morgan Freeman at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, wonders if he could ever make it “on the outside.” It gets me every time.

What I don’t see, because I’ve systematically blocked or unfollowed feeds that offer it, are the truly vile messages of normalized hate and the pained outrage from those targeted by it. I applaud the commitment of those fighting back and continue to donate to many doing the heaviest lifting. But I just can’t engage my own nervous system anymore.

I’ve described my news detox to friends as the most radical act of self-care I’ve taken in my long life, right up there with quitting smoking. Nicotine remains the addiction I think best compares to people who can’t put their phones down. They simply can’t butt out their cigarettes.

One of the biggest challenges in quitting any addiction are the social cues that pull you back in. Drinking comes to mind. You pass on a drink because you’re taking a month off, but the urge to imbibe with friends is Pavlovian. It was the same with cigarettes. I remember girlfriends I simply couldn’t chat with for any length of time without both of us chain-smoking.

The same applies to discussing the news in social situations. While it’s summertime and people are trying to take a break from all the madness in the world, or at least the madness amplified by news platforms, it’s still difficult to gather with friends without some reference to current events. In those moments, even a brief interjection into the conversation can leave me feeling sick to my stomach, like I once did if I sneaked a puff while trying to quit.

How long can I last? Forever, I hope. I would at least like to make it to my next doctor’s appointment to see if my blood pressure remains lower thanks to the removal of cortisol, or what I call the news, from my system.

In the meantime, I hope I can serve as a success story. If I can stop reading the news, truly anyone can.